I owe thanks to several folks who helped along the way with this one:
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marshall_payne , who read and critiqued the very first draft of this; aliettedb , who read not only the pre-Polish Challenge version before I muckied up the ending, but also read and approved my work on the final, final draft; tchernabyelo and theladywolf , for their fantastic LH Polish Challenge crits (in which both suggested I kill that really bad ending. I replaced it with a not-quite so bad ending that I ended up chopping off under editorial request); and finally, my good friend Travis Ramsey, who will unfortunately never get to read the story he inspired, but I think he'd have appreciated it. He's been gone since Christmas of 2002, taken far too young by brain cancer, but hardly a day goes by that I don't think about him in some small way.
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54,977 / 150,000 (36.7%) |
Not much work done the last couple of days. Jeff's taken the week off from work and so we've been doing things with the kids. Yesterday we went to Elitch Gardens amusement park and spent the day there. Finally got back to work today, starting off with getting some critiquing done. I also went over the galley of "Night Bird Soaring" for GUD, and for the first time, I've actually felt really good about a story that's been accepted. I'm not sure why, but usually after I've sold a story and read through the galley, one of my reactions is "Good grief this is horrible! What was the editor thinking to buy this?" I'd like to think that I have a lot of confidence in what I write, but obviously it's not as much confidence as I'd like to have. How to get over this, I don't know, but for the first time, I read a galley and came away feeling "that's a story to be proud of." I think it may have something to do with the fact that usually when I'm reading a galley, I find all sorts of things I wished I'd done differently but now it's too late. This story though I went through draft after draft, critique by a couple of my most trusted readers, and even was critiqued by Carina Gonzalez through her Zen Pen critique service. This story even got me out of the slush at F&SF. It ended up at a semi-pro magazine, but a snazzy-looking one with editors that showed great devotion to the copy-editing process (this is kind of interesting because I've seen references to bad copy editing in reviews of the first issue, so obviously they took that criticism seriously and made efforts to correct that. Copy editor Julia Bernd even went to so far as to check my Nahuatl and help me correct and streamline what I'd pretty much put together from a jumble of difference sources--I have much better reference books now than I did when I originally wrote this story). I really have nothing but good stuff to say so far about my experience with GUD and encourage everyone to submit their work there. The icing on the cake would be if the story comes with an illustration (I don't know if it does. I probably won't find out until my contributor's copy comes). Anyway, this is the first time that I've read the galley and thought, "I really love this story." It might get thoroughly torn apart in reviews, but I don't think that would change my opinion of it; for me it's my favorite of my published works.
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2,320 / 8,000 (29.0%) |
A good day of progress. I'm hoping to have this done in time to submit to the short story challenge over at Liberty Hall next Wednesday. I'm not too sure about the final word count, but that's generally the length I'm writing these days and I feel like I'm just getting into the meat of the story. I'm hoping to have time to go back and cut and fix stuff, for things are starting to coalesce thematically speaking. It's a sequel to my One World story "Night Bird Soaring", which is slated to appear soon in GUD, so aliettedb will immediately know which one's mine (she would have known even if I didn't say this, but I figure there's no use in hiding). I'm glad to be going back to this world since I haven't written a new one in it since my WotF finalist story, which, golly, has been over a year now (I think I might have written one since then, but I trunked it. Well, actually now that I think about it, I wrote a novella in this world but of course it's impossible to market those.).
Interestingly, I've been mentioned over the WotF forum as someone who's "been successful with stories based on folklore and mythology of Central or South America", which I find rather tickling but I really do have to wonder what I've done to deserve that distinction. Sure, I've published quite a few Aztec-based stories (no SA fiction, though I have written one and it's currently still in the revision stage), but I have only one semi-pro sale in the genre, the rest are all token (the Black Gate reprint would make it two semi-pro, if that pans out). Perhaps token markets are a little more influential than I tend to give them credit for? I'm skeptical, but who knows.... Anyway, being mentioned gave me a smile. And maybe some day I'll actually feel I qualify. :)
aliettedb for pointing out what was lacking and marshall_payne for helping me clean it up.
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5,043 / 50,000 (10.1%) |
Morning Star Rising (Total)
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67,035 / 150,000 (44.7%) |
So, an excellent start to NaNo, far better than I thought I'd be able to manage. This is more writing than I've done total in like three weeks, and I still got this far with having to stop to feed and play with babies (and he was quite cranky today, moreso than most days) and pick up kids from school. So maybe the 50k in a month isn't so out of the realm of possibility after all. Maybe I just need that deadline. I finished one chapter and started another one, and I'm pleased I was just able to dive right back in without much hesitation or feeling like I was out of the story.
In other news, my One World story "What Makes Us Strong" is now up at Atomjack. And those who were curious about the print I bought at MileHiCon, here's what it is.
I'm going to go make dinner now and bask in my productivity!
I'm sure many of you have heard the news that Harry Potter's mentor Dumbledore was declared to be gay by Rowling in a Q&A session with fans. I've seen some rather interesting discussions going on about whether or not this was information that Rowling unfairly sprung on folks after the fact and that nothing in the books' text support this assertion. It was a little startling for me when I first heard it, because I'd never even considered Dumbledore's orientation and it didn't strike me as odd at all that no love interest, past or present, was ever mentioned for him. Nor did the relationship between him and Grindelwald strike me as anything other than them being just "really good friends." It does make sense now that I know though, but others seem greatly appalled by Rowling dumping this information on us after the fact and that she should have given it to us in the books. I don't necessarily think this information was pertinent to the overall storyline, but it does beg the question of just how much of a character's back story are we obligated to give to the reader, and would there have been as much fuss about the withholding of information had the information been something like "Dumbledore was a Don Juan with the ladies when he was a young man"? I think the answer is no.
I've given this quite a bit of thought, the idea of "outing" characters, and part of me is of the opinion that there was no good reason to out Dumbledore in the books. But another part wants to argue that sexual orientation is more than an aside, that it greatly informs how we interact with other people and how we view the world. It's sort of akin to the character whose race is never identified in a story who is then later revealed to be black or hispanic and readers are taken aback because that wasn't how they read that character. Having this information about Dumbledore could have made the parts with Grindelwald read completely differently but was it necessary, or would it just have been a huge distraction to readers who would try to read a lot more into the text then was intended? How much of our characters' backstory do we owe to the reader, and is sexual orientation one of those defining characteristics that readers should be made aware of?
I just found out I've sold "What Makes Us Strong" (which is one of my One World Aztec alternate history stories) to Atomjack. This is special for me too because this marks the first time I've actually made a second sale to a magazine I'd sold to previously. They originally published another of my One World stories, called "The Last Arabian Prince," around December of last year, so I'm pleased to see the editor likes the series enough to buy another installment. It's slated to appear in the next issue, which I believe is in November, or maybe December. Thanks go out to
aliettedb and marshall_payne, as well as a good many folks at LH for their help on this piece.
isaiah13 and keesa_renee. It has a nice snazzy cover too. If you've got a few bucks burning a hole in your pocket and you're looking for something to read, give it a look.I haven't heard back yet about the story I sent to VT--another One World story--though the editor did mention it in the email and that he really likes the universe, but didn't say anything specific about it, so I'm assuming I'm still waiting for a yes or no on it.
A big thanks goes out to my friends at LH who gave their crits, marshallpayne, and the folks over at Shimmer, for encouraging me to take this story a step further than I had.
ETA: I almost forgot this: this morning I got an email from my editor at Atomjack telling me that he's nominated my story "The Last Arabian Prince" for the Million Writer's Award from StorySouth. Each editor is only allowed to nominate three stories, so I feel pretty special to be considered one of the top three stories he published last year.
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